The Man Burns for Real


Reprinted from Mercury News:

The Man Will Burn (For Real)

By Mark Boslet
Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 1:43 pm in Burning Man, General.

Tonight the man burns - for a second time. After a miscue earlier this week when an arsonist set it aflame and partly destroyed it, the refurbished, wooden man - from which the Burning Man festival takes its name - will go up after dark. The festival awaits in anticipation.

A night long celebration will be a welcome relief for burners, who this week have had to endure two fierce playa dust storms. White outs were common.
But the fun didn’t stop. “I wanted to stilt through a dust storm…naked,” said Corvus Woolf, who stared down from a pair of 4-foot stilts, his mohawk fluttering in the breeze. “I didn’t get to the naked part.”

Two more standout pieces of art:

1) Big Rig Jib: two 18 wheelers standing almost suspended in air, practically wrapped around each other, their trailers curved behind them like scorpions’ tails.

2) Steampunk Treehouse: A tree and tree house made of scrap metal, curved trunk, gaslight tree hideaway, branches extended like fingers. At night steam shoots into the sky.

One sad note: A Burning Man spokeswoman and a Bureau of Land Management official say there has been a death at this year’s festival. A man in his 20s was found dead in a tent, an apparent suicide. The word is he hung himself. We all grieve.